Captivating
Criminality 6: Metamorphoses of Crime: Facts and Fictions 12-15 June 2019
G.
d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy
Call
for Papers
The
Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its sixth conference,
which will be held in Italy. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from
the previous five successful conferences.
Metamorphoses
of Crime: Facts and Fictions will examine the ways in which Crime Fiction as a
genre incorporates elements of real-life cases and, in turn, influences society
by conveying thought-provoking ideas of deviance, criminal activity,
investigation and punishment.
Since
its inception, the genre has drawn inspiration from sensational crime reports.
In early nineteenth-century Britain, for example, Newgate novels largely drew
on the biographies of famous bandits, while penny dreadfuls popularized the
exploits of criminals and detectives to appeal the taste for horror and
transgression of their target audience. In similar ways, notorious cases widely
reported in the mid-Victorian press, such as the Road Murder (1860) or the
Madeleine Smith trial (1857), exerted a significant influence on the
imagination of mid- to late-Victorian novelists, including early practitioners
of the sensation genre who laid the premises for the creation of detective
fiction. In other cases, criminal actions were triggered by literary texts or turned
into appealing fictions by journalists. Suffice it to consider the sensation
created by Jack the Ripper’s murders in late-Victorian Britain or the
twentieth-century recent cases of murders committed by imitators of criminals
and serial killers featured in novels like A ClockWork Orange (1962), The
Collector (1963), Rage (1977), and American Psycho (1991). In more recent
times, the interaction between reality and other media (TV series, films,
computer games, websites, chats, etc.) has raised the question of how crime
continues to glamorize perturbing, blood-chilling stories of law-breaking and
law-enforcement.
In
addition to exploring these complex relations between facts and fictions, the
conference will focus on the metamorphoses of crime across media, as well as
cultural and critical boundaries. Speakers are invited to explore the crossing
of forms and themes, and to ascertain the extent to which canonized definitions
suit the extreme volatility of a genre that challenges categorization. From an
ideological viewpoint, moreover, crime fiction has proved to be highly
metamorphic, as it has been variously used to challenge, reinforce or simply
interrogate ideas of ‘law and order’.
The
enduring appeal of the genre is also due to its openness to historical and
cultural movements – such as feminism, gender studies, queer politics,
postmodernism – as well as to concepts drawn from specific fields of knowledge,
such as sociology and psychology. Similarly relevant to the ‘metamorphoses of
crime’ are cultural exchanges among remote areas of the world, which add new
perspectives to the genre’s representation of customs and ethnical issues.
Scholars,
practitioners and fans of crime writing are invited to participate in this
conference that will address these key elements of crime fiction and real
crime, from the early modern to the present day.
Topics
may include, but are not restricted to:
•
True Crime, Fictional Crime
•
Crime Reports and the Press
•
Real and Imagined Deviance
•
Adaptation and Interpretation
•
Crime Fiction and Form
•
Generic Crossings
•
Crime and Gothic
•
The Detective, Then and Now
•
The Anti-Hero
•
Geographies of Crime
•
Real and Symbolic Boundaries
•
Ethnicity and Cultural Diversity
•
The Ideology of Law and Order: Tradition and Innovation
•
Gender and Crime
•
Women and Crime: Victims and Perpetrators
•
Crime and Queer Theory
•
Film Adaptations
•
TV series
•
Technology
•
The Media and Detection
•
Sociology of Crime
•
The Psychological
•
Early Forms of Crime Writing
•
Eighteenth-Century Crime
•
Victorian Crime Fiction
•
The Golden Age
•
Hardboiled Fiction
•
Contemporary Crime Fiction
•
Postcolonial Crime and Detection
Plenary
speakers will be Eric Peter Sandberg (City University of Hong Kong) and
Maurizio Ascari (University of Bologna).
Please send 200 word proposals to Professor Mariaconcetta Costantini and
Dr Fiona Peters to the following email account:
captivatingcriminality6@unich.it
by 15th February 2019.
The
abstract should include your name, email address, and affiliation, as well as
the title of your paper. Please feel free to submit abstracts presenting work
in progress as well as completed projects. Postgraduate students are welcome.
Papers will be a maximum of 20 minutes in length.
Proposals
for suggested panels are also welcome.
The
fees are currently being decided; however they will not be more than any
previous CC conference, and might be less. We will send details of these
asap. There will be a reduction for students.
TRAVEL
AND CONFERENCE VENUE INFORMATION
G.
d’ Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara is located in Abruzzo, Central Italy.
One part of the campus is in Chieti on the Abruzzo hills. The other part, which
will be the main venue of the conference, is in Pescara. The Pescara campus,
which is near the city center, is very close to the Adriatic coast and the
pinewood celebrated by poet Gabriele D’Annunzio in his verse.
Pescara
is the biggest city in the region of Abruzzo, and it boasts a vibrant cultural
life, with an important jazz festival (Pescara Jazz Festival), a national
literary festival (Festival delle Letterature dell'Adriatico), and an
international film festival and competition (Flaiano Film Festival and
International Awards).
The
city has a small airport with direct connections to London Stansted, which
might be a useful option for those of you travelling from the UK (Ryanair
flight). There are also some Ryanair flights from other European cities).
Anyone
planning to travel from British and Continental cities can consider taking a
flight to Rome and then take a bus to Pescara (we advise against travelling by
train, since the connections are complicated and it takes longer than the bus).
You
can check timetables and prices on the following website (for connections from
either Fiumicino or Ciampino airports):
https://www.flixbus.co.uk/
or on the website http://www.dicarlobus.it/
(only for buses departing from Fiumicino)
More
detailed information about travel and details on hotels in Pescara will be
provided later.
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